The problem is, this game has a very specific target audience. It’s an homage to the old 16 bit Final Fantasy games of yore. I may have mentioned this before, but I will keep mentioning it: my parents wouldn’t let me have a nintendo when I was growing up. The first console I ever owned was a Nintendo 64, and that was well into the PS2′s life cycle. The game trades HEAVILY on nostalgia, and its nostalgia for a period of gaming I never experienced.

So while someone viewing this game through the lenses of their childhood will likely enjoy it, lets take a look at this game without nostalgia goggles.

My determination: meh.

The game did a lot right. First of all, it’s really funny, and the setting is original. The premise is that Earth was ravaged by nuclear war, the humans are dead, and the world is overrun by the undead. All the NPCs are skeletons and ghosts. And it’s pretty funny.

There’s one scene, for example, where the main character, a skeleton who doesn’t talk, attempts to order an alcoholic beverage from a bartender, but gets a chocolate milk instead. The game’s rarely laugh out loud funny, but it is pervasively quirky, and that’s enough. It keeps you entertained.

The other thing this game has is an expansive knowledge of the source material. If you didn’t know better, you’d assume this was a Super Nintendo game. It’s spot on. This is both good and bad. It’s good because for the nostalgia players, you want the game to be as close to the games you’re homaging/parodying. It’s bad because a lot of games back then had some pretty serious flaws; flaws that are recreated here.

For starters – the story? Nonexistant. The setting is brilliant, but there is no plot to speak of. There’s characters, but they don’t really have a driving motivation. The only way you know what to do is the fact that the game is linear. Thankfully the linearity is disguised, you leave the starter city to the world map, but there is only one other place on the world map you can go. There’s no reason to go there, other than the fact that there is nowhere else to go.

And I know, I know. Games were like that back then. They didn’t have journals or objectives or quest markers. The game is paying homage to a time when those things didn’t exist. But I’m viewing this game without the benefit of nostalgia and I felt a bit lost and aimless. It would have been nice to have a motivation and clear goals.

Combat is also a major part of this game, and thankfully, it’s fully turn-based (Final Fantasy’s Active Time Battle always annoyed me). The advantage of turn-based combat over real-time or a hybrid system is that you have the time to analyze your options and choose abilities carefully that compliment the specific scenario.

The problem is, while there seemed to be a fair number of spells and abilities available, battles seemed to go just as well if you just chose the default attack every time. There’s a lot of abilities, but no advantage to using them. Maybe combat gets more interesting farther into the game than I got. But in the part I played, it quickly devolved into just clicking the default action as quickly as possible.

Combat takes place on a plain black screen, which is bleak and uninteresting to look at. Even the original Final Fantasy had some attempt at a background. Maybe this was an ill placed homage to Final Fantasy Legend for the gameboy (sarcastic review here), whatever the reason, its just not visually interesting. And since the combat itself isn’t particularly interesting, encounters just feel like a chore. And encounters are a core aspect of the game.

All that said, the game isn’t bad. I never hated the game or got frustrated. It’s pretty well done – I just never really got hooked; I wasn’t compelled to play.

Did you play Final Fantasy 1-6 as a kid? If so, you’ll probably love this retro throwback. If not, this game wasn’t made for you; give it a pass.

The problem (if you could call it that) is that in January I either purchased or came into ownership of a staggering TWENTY-SIX new PC games. I only spent 34 dollars, which is pretty good restraint, but I now own every King’s Quest game, including fanmade sequels, almost every Serious Sam game, and a variety of random games I know nothing about, but were free.

I may not be making progress toward my stated goal of getting through my entire library by the end of the year, but the good news is you can look forward to 6 months more of posts from me! I’ve mixed these new games into the rotation, so you can expect to start seeing them soon!

Here are the first two videos:

More coming soon!

Interested in playing for yourself? You can download it for free at elderscrolls.com

I know some things about it; I know it was a mod for the original Half-Life that used to be free but now costs 5 dollars, I know it is a very obvious Tron rip-off, where people in brightly colored outfits jump around on light platforms and throw light disks at each other, and I know that somehow, I own a copy of it in my steam library.

The first problem I ran into is that this is a multiplayer ONLY game. The only option is to play online. There is almost nobody playing this game online, and the few who are have been playing the game for years. Not a great way to start out. Luckily, I did find a third party bot, and was able to get a game going.

As you can see, I didn’t do great.

Ricochet was designed by Valve as a mod for Half-Life. This was part of a successful strategy of improving Half-Life’s value: you weren’t just buying one game, you were essentially buying a bunch of games, including Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress, and yes, Ricochet. While most mods for Half-Life were action-based gun-shooting games, Ricochet was designed to be different, and as a showcase of how you can do some pretty crazy modifications to the engine, it was successful. As a game, however, it was not.

The concept was pretty sound – the idea is that you play as a Tron guy. You are standing on these small platforms. You throw discs at your opponent trying to knock them off their platform, meanwhile, they are doing the same.

There are also “bumpers”, which will bounce your disc off at an angle, allowing you to hit your opponent on a bounce. This is, as far as I can tell, the only difference between Ricochet and “Discs of Tron”. A direct hit on an opponent resulting in a kill is one point, with one additional point awarded per bounce.

So the strategy for big points is, in theory, not to aim at your opponents, its to aim at the bumpers, performing skill shots. Except, of course, that you and your opponent are both constantly moving, and the game is first person, not top down, so it is impossible to perform these shots. Sometimes you may fire one off and get super lucky, but it is rare. Instead, you just focus on aiming directly at your opponent, like any other game.

The fact that the game doesn’t play the way it was designed is only a problem if it isn’t fun. This is where Ricochet fails: it just isn’t fun. Sure, fun is subjective, but it just seemed like chaotic randomness to me, and it didn’t help that RicoBot (aka Butts) trounced me. It combined jump-based platforming with competitive multiplayer and I’m not a fan of either.

But don’t take my word for it, on Valve’s website there is no mention of Ricochet anywhere. The only possible mention is that from 1998-2004 they released “eleven games that changed the world (and one that didn’t).”

I think Ricochet is that game.

So I picked it back up, a year later, and dove in headfirst, not really remembering what I was doing or how to play the game. As per my usual, I filmed it, and you can see the results below. However, normally i try to film about a half hour’s worth of play and edit it down to about 5-8 minutes, here, I got lost in the moment and played for over an hour. It was a bitch to edit down, and the end result is a bit choppy in places, but here you go:

I did wind up going back and starting a new game from the beginning and playing it through to the end. My full thoughts after the break:

As I mentioned above, I’ve fancied myself a fan of Monkey Island for the majority of my life. I think my first exposure to the franchise was in 4th or 5th grade when I played Curse of Monkey Island (Monkey Island 3) at a friends house. I loved it, but my parents didn’t really spend their money buying me video games, and I spent my allowance elsewhere.

A few years later, neither my spending habits nor my parents’ had changed, but I had discovered something: the game demo. I downloaded tons of demos from happypuppy.com (I just checked for the first time in years, it seems to no longer be a site). This suited both my inability to save up money week to week and my (still present) inability to focus on a single game for very long. It was in this phase of my life that I found the demo for Monkey Island 4. And boy did I love that demo!

Most demos I would play through once or twice and then move on to the next thing, but this demo, I played it through many times, and thoroughly too. I had to see every dialogue option. Sadly, it was just a demo, so I only saw the first bits of game. Monkey Island 4 was the last game released for many years, too, so when I hit my game buying prime, it was nothing more than an oft-forgotten fond memory.

But the last three years have seen a resurgence in the brand. Monkey Island 1 & 2 have been re-released in “Special Editions” with complete graphic overhauls, and the 5 part “Tales of Monkey Island” was also released. These games have found a way into my posession, yet they haven’t really gotten play…until now.

That’s my history with the franchise. So hopefully it will make a certain degree of sense when I say that despite the fact that I have never played Secret of Monkey Island before, this game had a fair amount of nostalgia backing it up. This game had all the elements I remember from that Monkey Island 4 demo: Guybrush Threepwood, a wannabe pirate; Elaine Marley, the governor of Melee Island; and Ghost Pirate LeChuck, a ghost pirate who is up to no good. The Scumm Bar, the local tavern, is featured prominently in both games. I even think the soda machine at Stan’s shipyard and the vicious pirhana poodles were in both games. In fact, Monkey Island 1 and 4 may have pretty much identical first acts – more on that later this year when I play 4. But the point is, it all felt very familiar to me, in a good way.

The story is pretty straightforward, Guybrush Threepwood comes to Melee Island in the hopes of becoming a pirate, but first must complete three trials. In the course of completing his trials, he meets and falls in love with Governor Elaine Marley, but before anything can happen, she is kidnapped by Ghost Pirate LeChuck and taken to Monkey Island. Guybrush must then get a crew and a ship and perform a daring rescue.

The gameplay will be very familiar to anyone familiar with old point & click adventure games. you basically just walk around, pick stuff up, and talk to people. The stuff you pick up you will later use in interesting or clever ways to solve puzzles, allowing you to progress the story. What is different about Monkey Island is the sense of humor it has. Everything about Monkey Island is delightfully zany. For example, there’s not one, but two puzzles that require the item “Rubber Chicken with a Pulley in it” to solve.

This is a double edged sword: while this is delightfully fun, it can also be frustrating at times. When trying to solve a puzzle, your first thought is NOT going to be, oh, I’m going to get a rubber chicken with a pulley in it. The absurdity can make some puzzles frustratingly difficult to solve.

Luckily, the special edition has come up with a solution for this: the “Hint” button. Whenever you want, you can press H and it will give you a hint as to what you’re supposed to do next: First vague, then more specific each time you press it. Its great at getting you unstuck when you’re frustrated enough you would just close the game and look it up on the internet anyway; but its ease of use and unlimited potential can lead to an over-reliance.

I love what they did with the art here. Monkey Island 1 & 2 were heavily pixelated, but aimed for a sense of realism with their characters. Monkey Island 3 had a different art style, introducing a much more cartoony Guybrush and world. This art style persisted in the games since. So when they were creating the HD graphics for the special edition of Monkey Island 1, they modified all the graphics to be in the caricatured style of later games. I think this was a brilliant decision, not only does this add a sense of cohesion to the franchise, but it also brings the art style more in line with the rest of the game. If everything else about the game is silly, why shouldn’t it LOOK silly. If, however, you are a purist, you can press F10 at any time and switch between the new graphics mode and classic graphics.

One final note, my friends, who are mainly PC gamers, often give me shit for preferring to play with a gamepad, arguing that mouse and keyboard is the way to play, and often, I will concede that they are right. The mouse gives you a level of precision that you can’t get from a gamepad joystick, and in competitive shooters, this is a big deal. Also, certain games like RTSs and MMOs require so many keys that a keyboard is necessary. You might think that a game designed to be played with only a mouse would be a shoe-in as a game that is better played on mouse and keyboard. It isn’t. Monkey Island: SE should, if possible, be played on the Xbox 360 with a gamepad.

See, the game relies heavily on a verb menu and an inventory menu, which are mapped to V and I respectively. Intuitive, but not super convenient. On a gamepad, this is mapped to left trigger and right trigger – much more accessible on its own, not a huge deal, but when you need to open the verb menu, select something, open the inventory menu, select something, then click on something in the world, and its one of a couple timed puzzles, the slight accessibility advantage becomes clear. Also, on the PC version, when talking you need to click on the line of dialogue you want to speak, however, my copy at least had some trouble with that, and you had to click slightly below the text. not a huge deal, but sometimes you had to click two or three times to get it to select what you wanted. the Xbox 360 version auto highlights the text, so you just have to move the joystick up or down and press A. It is impossible to not click on text. Lastly, there is a quick select verb option in both versions. On the PC, you have to mousewheel up and down until the verb you want appears. On the xbox, you use the d-pad, with each direction corresponding to a different verb, which is much more convenient: you can select the verb you want directly every time instead of having to scroll through a list.

Small improvements to be sure, and either version is playable, however, the next time somebody tries to tell me that mouse/keyboard is always better, I will refer them back here.

With that being said, I had a ton of fun with this game, and I can’t wait to play Monkey Island 2. Let the year of the Monkey commence!

There was a time — I recall it! — when I was able to play games without marked quest-givers, without useful in-game maps, the kind of games that just dropped you right into the deep end of the pool with a stern reminder that it would “build character.”

I am getting ahead of myself.

Half-Life 2 isn’t a game I chose for myself. I don’t care much for first-person shooter type games, not because I find them distasteful but just because by and large they don’t especially appeal to me. Evan somehow had a spare key that he passed along to me as a “bonus” Christmas gift. I claimed it but it pretty much just sat around for a year, and it wound up first on my list of unplayed games to tackle in 2012.

So how did it go? Well…

This pretty much sums up my Half-Life 2 experience: wandering depressing hallways covered with tattered propaganda posters. Actually this is nicer than my last apartment. Where's the For Rent magazine?

I went into it knowing pretty much exactly nothing about the game or the franchise, save a passing familiarity with the main character Gordon Freeman (because how can you not know who he is?) and the fact that I have seen Evan shoot up lots of identical dudes wearing headcrab hats. The game really pulls no punches at all about throwing you into chaos — the mysterious intro puts you directly into Gordon’s shoes, and the player’s confusion prompts immediate identification with him.

I had a lot of fun listening to the propaganda reel, being thoroughly creeped out by the masked guards, and bumbling around until I found the single valid route out of the area — but even at this point, I was thinking to myself, what am I supposed to be doing now?

I was grateful to receive direction once it came — keep going until you get to the plaza! — but once I got to what I assume was the plaza, I was stuck once again. All the doors appeared to be locked and the gates out of the area patrolled by security cameras and impassable. I circled around for a while, receiving no prompts or even any dialogue from any of the other citizens in the area. No other friendly personage showed up to meet me. Bear in mind that all I really know how to do at this point is pick stuff up, throw it, and move around. Eventually I put my limited knowledge to use to climb up a fire escape and leap over a fence, because it seemed like the only thing to do. Loading message, that means I solved the puzzle, right?

In the next area, I got to run around a neighborhood full of miserable citizens undergoing a police inspection. After a fair amount of aimless wandering (and fruitless searching for anything to interact with), suddenly there’s an alert! Miscount detected! My fellow citizens, aware that I don’t belong in their section, rush to hide me! To the roof, they cry, hurry! So, I ran to the roof…

And I got there! Success, right? Except that once I got to the roof, again, without any obvious cue what my next goal should be, I pretty much just ran around aimlessly looking for something to point me in the right direction. And got gunned down. Okay, back to the checkpoint, I’ll try another direction this time. Ooops, died. So, okay, I’ll try another way… oops, that’s where I came from… oops dead.

Half-Life 2, you look awful neat, and your setting is creepy and compelling, but I will have to return to you sometime when I’m feeling more patient and generous, and when I’m not having a great time in another game that goes out of its way to throw tons of cool stuff to do at me.

UP NEXT FOR ROSE: Bastion

Looking back, I don’t think we played Team Fortress 2 at that LAN after all. But I digress.

The point is, I owned Episode 1 for a long time, but never played it, since it was a sequel and until very recently, I hadn’t beaten the original.

But coming fresh off my completion of Half-Life 2, I jumped right into Episode 1. Or as this video demonstrates, I fell right off of Episode 1:

Without getting into spoiler territory, at the very end of Half-Life 2, you DO SOMETHING. Immediately after you DO SOMETHING, the game ends. You don’t really get to see the effects SOMETHING had on the world around you, or what happened to THAT ONE PERSON.

So my main hope for Episode 1 was that it would pick up those plot threads and continue the story – and it did not disappoint. The game starts exactly where Half-Life 2 ends. It continues the story, wrapping up plot points from the previous game, while setting up new plot points of its own. And there’s some really great characterization, too. This is probably the best story of the Half-Life games so far (leaving me with high expectations for Episode 2).

As far as gameplay, it’s basically more of the same. This is not a bad thing. All the weapons you know and understand are back, and the majority of the enemies you face are returning enemies, and the new. There are a couple new things, a Zombie version of the Combine soldiers you’ve been fighting, who will pull out a grenade and charge you. There are some holes that spawn infinite antlions until you plug them, also you have a companion with you almost the entire game. In fact, there’s an achievement for beating the whole game without firing a bullet (technically you fire ONE to break a lock), and I played the game that way. pretty much every encounter can be solved without you firing a gun. It’s a lot of fun!

The first couple levels are a little weird though, The game starts you off with a platforming/puzzle area that, as you can see in the video, I had a bit of trouble with. Then the second level feels almost like the very first level of Half-Life, back in Black Mesa, doing a series of menial tasks to shoot laser beams into glowy balls for “science”. They’re different. I can’t tell you if that was a good thing or bad thing. They were either my favorite or least favorite part of the game. I feel very strongly about them.

But one of my favorite things about this game is that it was SHORT. Only 5 levels. About a third of the length of Half-Life 2. And many people may think that I’m being sarcastic here, that less content cannot possibly be better. I’m not, and it is.

With Half-Life 2, there were some levels that accomplished nothing. I’ve spoken about this. They served no purpose but to make the game longer. They were pretty, they were fun, but they were purposeless. They were padding. Episode 1 is a game without padding. It knows exactly what it has to accomplish, and it gets in there and does exactly that and no more. Plus, games with 100 hour stories often sit unfinished on my shelf, a 5 hour game is doable. This is a game you will finish, and feel good about it.

In fact, its good enough, I just might play it through again.

NEXT WEEK: Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition

Monkey Island is yet another of those franchises that I have loved my entire life, but have never finished a game. This year, I’m going to try and play all nine, start to finish. Come back next week to witness the first steps in that journey!

Of late, I’ve been playing the game AMY. If you’re not familiar, its a new Survival Horror game that just came out for Xbox Live Arcade. Here’s a trailer:

My experiences with this game after the break, but for any who don’t make the jump, let me be clear: you probably shouldn’t buy this game.

The concept is pretty solid: there’s a zombie apocalypse, and you’ve been infected. You’re traveling with a little girl named Amy who for some reason exudes curative waves. Travel too far away from her and the world turns into a nightmarish hellscape as your contamination levels rise. However you’ll need to send her away to solve puzzles to aid you in your escape.

Rose and I are both big Silent Hill fans, conceptually at least. Neither of us are really GOOD at that kind of game. The old ones have archaic control schemes that make it very hard to get into, and most people will tell you that the newer ones just aren’t very good. I haven’t played any Silent Hill game for more than a few hours, and I’m not sure Rose has played them at all, but we did go out of our way to watch youtube playthroughs of the first 3 Silent Hill games so we could get a feel for them without actually playing them. I enjoy being scared, not frustrated.

So when I saw that trailer, and some of the other promotion videos (ones showing actual gameplay), I got excited for AMY. It looks like a modern Silent Hill game, but new and original.

I downloaded the free trial and was hooked. I ponied up the 10 bucks for the full version.

Something you should know about these posts is that sometimes I write them incrementally over several days. As I play the game more, I add to the post. I write down my impressions of a game as I go, and then edit the post all into a long (hopefully) coherent point. The will be impossible for this game – its important that you see not only what my impressions of the game are, but also what parts of them game I am at when I have them. What follows is a timeline of my impressions of the game as time progresses.

January 11th, Game Launch Day, Played Chapter 1:

The game AMY is a strange beast to categorize. I’m sure the environment will draw comparisons to Silent Hill. The zombies will draw comparisons to Resident Evil. The “big person with a little person” gameplay will draw comparisons to ICO(I haven’t played ICO, that’s a thing, right?). My time with AMY so far has brought me to compare it to two other games, games you probably won’t hear it compared to other places.

First of all, it reminds me a lot of Hydrophobia. Hydrophobia was a game that had a good high concept. It was published by a small indie studio, and was their first major game release.

People often talk of “polish” in video games. They will say “this game was well polished” or “this game could have used more polishing”. This always irritates me – “polish” isn’t a real thing. If something is quantifiably wrong with a game, say it. If a game is riddled with bugs, say “the game is riddled with bugs”.

That being said, when comparing Hydrophobia to its peers, games like Tomb Raider: Underworld, something just felt a little off. Maybe it was the animations, maybe it was the camera, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I’m not going to say it was “less polished” than its big-studio, big-budget brethren, but there was something unmistakably off… just not off enough for me to be able to put my finger on it. And you know what? That’s okay. We’re not talking about a big budget game I paid 60 bucks for. This is a 10 dollar game, and a fun one at that.

AMY is the same way. It doesn’t quite measure up to Silent Hill (Though, to be fair, I’m not sure recent Silent Hill games measure up, either). There’s something off, something not quite right that I can’t put my finger on. But it doesn’t have measure up. It’s a different beast. It’s ten bucks, and its fun.

The other game AMY reminded me of is a bit more of a stretch, but bear with me: The original Assassin’s Creed.

Ubisoft came up with a high concept: combine the stealth aspects from their popular Splinter Cell franchise with the 3D platform climbing from their popular Prince of Persia franchise. And in a way, they succeeded. Jumping off a rooftop and stabbing a guy was a whole lot of fun. But while the gameplay was finely honed, the game itself was not – there were only about three different types of missions, so the game quickly got repetitive. Assassin’s Creed’s major success was not as a game, but as a proof of concept of the game it COULD be. The next year, Assassin’s Creed II came out and blew everyone away.

Admittedly, at this point I’ve only played one level, but it seems like a lot of the conventions will quickly get repetitious, and there may not be enough game here to qualify it as “good” despite it being fun. At the very least, though, it’s a great jumping off point, and its got me excited for the possibilities Amy 2 could bring to the table.

January 12th, Started Chapter 2:

I’m a little baffled right now. The game I was praising just yesterday is gone – in its place is a mess of absolutely piss-poor design choices. The fun is gone, but don’t worry, tedium and frustration are here to take its place.

The first level was actually pretty good. You always had a clear objective. Find Amy -> fight this one monster -> get through this fence -> cut the power, etc. You always have not only a objective, but a feeling that what you’re doing ties to the plot.

Chapter 2 was different. You rarely have a sense of what you’re supposed to do, or why you’re supposed to be doing it. You basically wander around the level interacting with anything you can in the hopes that it will give you some nebulous clue as to what you’re supposed to do next. And the easy zombie monsters that you could kill with one or two hits of a melee weapon? They’re gone. Even on “easy” difficulty, the only monsters I encountered were all invincible behemoths who kill you in one hit.

So, as you wander searching for what to do next, you WILL die. A lot. You will learn 8 things that kill you before you learn the one thing that won’t. This wouldn’t be too bad, except that every time you die, you restart at the previous checkpoint. There are very few checkpoints, so this frequently means you are starting the level over at the beginning.

Some of the solutions you are repeatedly dying to figure out involve AMY. I’m convinced AMY is an acronym for AI Murders You. I had AMY drop a portcullis on my head, crushing me to death. I had AMY stand stubbornly in an area I know a patrolling guard would see her, no matter how many times I pressed the “come to me” button. Not to mention the countless times you plant AMY somewhere and try to accomplish a task with her out of the way, and you die of infection before you can get back to her. The times when you try something and it doesn’t work and you have to try again, those are frustrating, but at least you learned something. That information will help you next time. But there are an equal number of times you die and are forced to restart the level due to random happenstance with the Artificial “Intelligence” or because your timing is off by a second. You learned nothing, your failure has no purpose.

You will play the same 5-10 minutes of gameplay over and over and over for hours. Failure after failure, death after death. And let me reiterate, unless you hit a checkpoint, you are starting over. Even if you do succeed, when you fail at the next part, you will have to replay that part over and over.

It’s also worth noting that these are not open-ended problems that you need to come up with creative solutions to. There is one specific solution.

I played AMY for about 4 hours tonight. I started at the beginning of Chapter 2. About 2 hours in, I hit a checkpoint (it was maybe 10 minutes total of gameplay, repeated). Then, the area after the checkpoint was even more frustrating than what was before. After four hours, I could not take it. I shut off my xbox, i wasn’t getting past this tonight.

There’s one more TERRIBLE design flaw I haven’t mentioned yet. There is NO SAVE SYSTEM, just a level select. I played this TERRIBLE GAME for four of the MOST FRUSTRATING hours I have ever spent gaming, and made ZERO progress. If I ever play this game again, I would have to start at the beginning of level 2 again. And that’s a pretty big IF.

I made a resolution to try to finish any games I bought this year, but I may have to make an exception for AMY.

January 13th, Reattempted Chapter 2:

I’ve made a huge mistake. Well, two huge mistakes.

The first mistake was buying AMY on launch day. The puzzles are terrible, the kind of terrible where you say “fuck it” and look up a walkthrough online. But, since the game is so new, there aren’t any walkthroughs yet. The best I could find was a video “walkthrough” of a guy playing the game who was clearly just as confused as I am.

The second mistake is buying AMY at all. Seriously, DO NOT BUY AMY.

A lot of video game reviews exist at one of two extremes, either a game is the best ever, or is the worst ever. I try not to do that here, in fact what I do isn’t normally even reviewing games, its more of just describing my experiences with them in a reasoned and levelheaded, fair manner.

But this article is, unlike my norm, very heavily slanted to one extreme – and it’s because the game is. This game is BAD.

I really wanted to like this game, I did. I gave the game so many chances to redeem itself. It didn’t, and in fact, the more I played it, the more problems I had.

As I’ve mentioned, the game requires you to execute a series of movies in a very specific order. Attempting to do anything else, or failing, results in your death. Let me give you an example of what I’m trying to do here:

There’s a room with a guard in it you need to crouch, hold AMY’s hand, and walk past, timing when you go past the door so the guard doesn’t see you. Then you need to interact with a phone, and go hide in a locker, wait for the guard to come investigate the phone, then open a gate and patrol the later part of the level. After hiding for about 30 seconds, pop out of the locker, go investigate the room the guy was in, then have amy draw a picture. This part isn’t hard, but it is time consuming, and you have to replay it every time you fail.

The guard has moved forawrd to protect the next area you will be going to. He patrols, very slowly, in an L pattern. If he sees you, you die. At the corner of his L path, there is a door. You need to sneak behind him, open the door and hide in the room, then once he gets to the other end of his path you sneak to the other end of the hall, and shove AMY in a hole. You then go back to the room at the L elbow, and hurry, because if you don’t do this before he turns back around, he will see you and you will die. In the room, you climb a ladder to a metal walkway above the L hallway. Here, you also need to be careful, and time your run perfect, because he can see this walkway, and will kill you. A lot. However, don’t take too long doing this, because you are now seperated from AMY and if you stay away from her too long, you die. Once you make your way across the walkway unseen, you open a door. You are now in a room with AMY, but a level above her, you need to tell her to stand on the elevator, press a button to get the elevator to come up. Hold her hand to heal. Now you stand on the elevator, tell AMY to go press a button and you get sent down. Pick up a keycard that AMY couldn’t get, because it’s on a box.

Now, to exit this room, you need to do everything you just did, in reverse. If at any point you die, you restart at the checkpoint.

Yesterday, I had a problem with that, but when I decided to play again today, I reached a level of ZEN about the obvious design flaws, yes they’re terrible, but it is what it is, and if I’m going to beat the game, I just need to get past it. I’m trying to beat the games I buy this year, to avoid the sort of problems that caused me to start making blog posts here in the first place.

So i had come to peace with the fact that I would have to play PERFECTLY in order to beat it, the slightest deviation from perfect would result in my death. If I’m one inch too close to a door, if I’m one half a second too slow and that results in my death, that’s my fault – I should have been perfect.

But I got to a point where I ran into another, even worse problem.

You walk from the walkway above the guard through a door, then you futz about with AMY for a while before you have to go do the whole thing backwards, right? Well, when you leave the room, you have to open the door, and if the guard sees that door open, you die. Now, there’s no way to tell the guards position prior to opening the door, and you’ve been in this room too long to really time it out, so the only solution is to open the door and hope. Based on the guard’s path, there is a 1 in 4 chance of him seeing you, maybe higher.

That’s right, playing perfect is no longer enough, playing perfect still has a 25% chance of failure. HOW IS THIS GOOD DESIGN?

I don’t know why, but that was the final straw for me.

This game is brutally hard, even on “Easy” difficulty. I can’t even imagine what it is like on Medium or Hard. It’s monotonous, it’s frustrating. I tried so hard to find a redemptive point to counterweight my article and it just isn’t there.

If you are thinking about buying this game, don’t. If you are thinking about getting the free trial, and seeing for yourself if you want to play the game, don’t. The first level, in the trial, IS A LIE. The first level is playable, the rest of the game is not. The trial is not representative of the game, it is a deceptive ploy to trick the easily fooled from their money. It happened to me. Don’t let it happen to you.

You have probably already figured out, I am a big fan of plot in video games. But you may not know just how deep it goes; see, I have a compulsion for continuity and order. If there is even a thread of plot carried over from an earlier game, I can’t play the sequel until I’ve played the original. I have a lot of sequels in my game library that haven’t been played for just this reason.

So when I resolved to play the unplayed games in my library, many of those were sequels, and they went on my list. Now I am CONTRACTUALLY OBLIGATED to play these games (it’s a verbal contract).

That didn’t make my compulsion go away, however. So in addition to the 52 games I’ll be trying out this year, I’ve also got a bunch of games that I need to beat before I can play these sequels. Prerequisites, if you will. Games I never beat, but now I have to in order for my compulsion to allow me to play the follow-ups.

The first such game I encountered on my yearlong journey was Half-Life 2.

I remember back in 2004, when Half-Life 2 first came out, I still lived at home with my parents, was still in school, had just started my first job a few months prior and had some money saved up. I was really excited to play the game, and wound up spending something like 500 dollars building my first gaming rig so I’d have a PC to play it on. 500 dollars was LOT back then, but to me, it was worth it. I really wanted that game, and the computer I had was old and decrepit. I wound up buying the special edition which came with a T-Shirt. I still have that shirt (and it was an extra-large, so it still fits).

I remember being frustrated trying to install the game, as my bedroom didn’t have an internet connection, and the disk only contained 99% of the game files. The last 1% had to be downloaded from a new program called “Steam” which irritated me to no end. I hated this “Steam” and wondered why anyone would need it. Now, 8 years later, I use it almost exclusively for my PC games.

I had a lot of fun with that game. The world was immersive, and there was a revolutionary physics engine that added a puzzle solving aspect to the platforming. Many of the puzzles are solved using real-world logic, not video-game logic. Need to elevate a ramp? Weigh down one end with bricks. Need a car battery? Look in a car.

I found the plot to be lacking, though. Sure, the world is set up beautifully. You meet some interesting characters, the levels are designed wonderfully, but there really isn’t a driving force for most of the game. There’s an especially troublesome part in the middle of the game where you go through a zombie town, then a highway, then a bug filled beach. Three LONG levels with no new plot points – you’re really only doing what you’re doing because the levels are linear enough you have no choice.

Sure, prior to that, somebody gets kidnapped, and you’re supposed to rescue him, but you really only met that guy for like 2 minutes before you embarked on the 6 hour solitary quest. At a certain point I just gave up. It was cool and all that I was walking on the trusses under a bridge, sure. But why?

4 or 5 times since then I would go back and try to play the game again, always starting from the beginning, either because I had uninstalled and deleted my saves, or because I forgot the plot (because there wasn’t one) and my compulsion for story made me start over. Each time I made it just a bit further than I had the prior time, but always wound up quitting in that 3-4 level span.

But alas, Half-Life 2: Episode 1 was looming on my “games to play” list this year, so I popped Half-Life 2 back in and gave it another try. It had been a while since I played, and since then, Valve had released both Left 4 Dead games and both Portal games. It’s interesting to note that Half-Life 2 came out before these games, because it seems to steal design pillars from them. I guess this game was the inspiration for them that nobody noticed.

For example, The Left 4 Dead series has a sort of “plot by gameplay” mechanic. The plot of those games is “4 people trying not to get eaten by zombies”. If you look deeper, there’s more to it than that, there’s notes on the wall that give a bit more plot, you can tie each campaign together to form a more cohesive story, even the two games’ plots intertwine, but if you’re not paying close attention to the game you will miss all that. The core “plot” of that game is nothing more than interesting characters plus interesting gameplay. And it works.

And if you look at Half-Life 2 through that lens, you see that’s exactly what they tried to do. In my opinion, though, they fell short because Gordon Freeman just isn’t a very interesting character. I realize there’s a mechanic in games to have a silent protag, but it rarely works for me, and it isn’t working here. Alyx Vance is a refreshing change of pace though. She doesn’t factor in in any major way until the last 1/3 of the game I never got to until now, which is a problem. Honestly, she’s a much cooler character than Gordon. Half the time, I wished I was playing as her. But when she’s around you get a much better feel for the “plot”, and once you get past the early parts of the game without her, it makes a big turn for the better.

Similarly, Portal is a series of puzzle games. They will introduce a new gameplay mechanic, first in an area where you are in no danger, then iterate you through a series of test chambers where you solve increasingly difficult challenges with that gameplay mechanic, culminating in puzzles that combine the new mechanic with what you had previously learned. Half-Life 2, while less obvious about it, does the exact same thing.

Every element of the game, movement, combat, platforming, physics, vehicles, the gravity gun, new enemies, all of them are introduced first in an area where you are safe and can observe how to do them. Then each encounter will force you to use it in a slightly more difficult manner, eventually combining it with previous game elements. Each level of the game is basically them teaching you something new. Then, the end of the game, it all comes together.

That said, my most recent trip through the game wasn’t ALL enjoyable. The platforming, especially late in the game, is heinous. I’m not talking about the puzzle-based “use weights or floats to raise a ramp” platforming, that was fine. I had a problem with the portions of the game where you had to use the gravity gun to move objects to create a series of makeshift platforms for you to jump across to avoid electrified water/toxic sludge. You need to make a long series of precision jumps onto objects that are moving. Also there’s a couple spots late in the game where you have to run along a protracted series of thin beams. If you fall off, you probably won’t die, but you will need to go back to the beginning of your run, losing several minutes of progress. Did I mention that people are shooting you with bullets that move your body? Because they are.

These areas weren’t intuitive from a pathfinding sense, often seeming like dead ends, which, in a game as linear as this, was a real problem. On top of that, the game hadn’t prepared me for this sort of precision movement during combat. Luckily, these segments were short, and I was playing on easy, so I made it through without TOO much disruption to my flow.

I did beat the game this time, and the ending was…abrupt. They were finally starting to lay in some story toward the end, and BAM, no resolution, just some wierdness, then credits. It did, however, get me excited for more, and since moving on to Episode 1 was my stated goal through all this, I’d say it worked. Episode 1 had better show the results of my actions here, though, or I am gonna be pissed.

All in all though, I did enjoy myself. The game holds up surprisingly well and is a very different animal from modern First Person Shooters.

I know Rose has a copy laying around her Steam library (because I gifted her my extra copy when I bought the Orange Box), and will be playing it at some point this year. I’m excited to see what she thinks of it.

So the game I am playing this week, Hitman: Codename 47, is not a game I just happened upon. It is a game I actively went out of my way to own.

Years ago, I bought a different bundle of games, back in the days when games came out on CD-ROMs. It had Hitman: Contracts, Tomb Raider Chronicles, and a couple other games in it (Now that I think about it, that may be how I first came to own Deus Ex). My enthusiasm at the time leaned toward some of the other games in the pack, but I did play Hitman: Contracts, and remembered it fondly.

Likewise, when Hitman: Blood Money came out a few years ago, I had some degree of excitement for it. I rented it for my 360, played it for a while, then returned it. My brief time with the title was enjoyable.

All that history is a long-winded way of saying that I was genuinely excited to play the original Hitman this week. The game did not live up to my expectations.

I recorded myself playing and edited down this video:

I had three major problems:

1) The controls. Oh god, I realize this game is 10+ years old, but still. WOW. You have two options: Mouse and numpad or mouse and “WSAD”. Since mouse and numpad are both designed to be used by the right hand, you’re pretty much stuck with “WSAD”. It’s not the default, though, and none of the controls are remappable.

I’ve played my share of games using WASD. This wasn’t WASD. In WASD, W is forward, S is backward, A is strafe left, D is strafe right. In Hitman’s “WSAD” W is run forward, S is walk forward, and A and D turn. To emulate WASD, you have to use SZXC. It’s a major adjustment. On top of that, every other control is mapped poorly. Reloading your gun is 1, Toggle Sneak is 4, and both firing and zooming your sniper rifle is LMB. Its an uncontrollable madhouse. At a certain point I gained a passing familiarity, but never a mastery, and any time I tried to do something new, I had to pull up the menu, look it up, and then wonder why the Hell they chose what they did.

2) The text/interface is tiny/unreadble. This game came out in 2000, so it was designed to be played in 640×480. The game supports up to 1600×1200 (which I played it at), but the text doesn’t scale. All the text is microscopic. In the closed captions its forgivable, because you just listen and don’t need to read them. But when you try to interact with anything – open a door, pick up some ammunition, push a button, loot a corpse – a context sensitive menu pops up allowing you to select how you want to interact with it. There’s also important mission information in the top left that you need to read (including the message that lets you know you failed). You need to read all of it, and unless your monitor is massive, its near impossible to read.

Subsequent playthroughs I bit the bullet and just played at 1024×768.

3) The tutorial level doesn’t teach you how to play the game. Maybe I sound like a noob at this point, or maybe I sound like I’m grasping at straws, but I feel this was a legitimate problem. There is no on-screen prompts of what the controls are or what your objectives are. For the first 3/4 of the level there is a guy on the intercom (who sounds like Vlad from Magicka) talking about what you’re doing, but not really telling you what to do. During this 3/4 of the level you pick up various weapons and fire them all. Seriously, there’s like 4 firing ranges and an interactive course with popup targets you need to shoot. All the while “Vlad” is encouraging you to go on this shooting spree.

Then, at the last part of the level, you need to kill a guy, steal his clothes, then use the disguise to get past a guy at the next checkpoint. But at this point in the game, Vlad shuts the hell up and lets you figure all this out on your own. I didn’t know the guy was hostile until he started yelling and charging at me. I actually tried to pull up the map to find out if he was a hostile or not (you can’t use the map this level). Then, after playing the tutorial telling me to fire my guns recklessly, and shooting a dude point blank with a shotgun, I went into the next room and killed that guy too. That’s what the tutorial level taught me to do. This caused me to fail the level.

Did I mention that there is no saving? If you fail, you have to restart the level at the beginning. I understand the dynamic for the regular game. A lot of problem solving in Hitman is based on trial and error – try beating the level a certain way, and find out what works and what kills you, then try again until you succeed, and in the main game, its open world. It works. When you fail there its because of what you did, and the next time you fix it. Here however, it was incredibly frustrating – they actively teach you to behave a certain way, and then when you behave that way, they punish you.

A second playthrough of the tutorial level revealed to me that all the extensive weapon training “Vlad” is telling you to do? Totally skippable. The part of the game the tell you to do is optional. Bizarre design choices all around on this tutorial. It just seems like it was tacked on the front as an afterthought, and I’d be kind of okay with that except it’s not skippable.

But, frustrations aside, I did play the game a second time, and I enjoyed it much more. The first level you need to take out a Triad leader. after trying (and failing) some more complicated strategies, I found out that you can just shoot the dude with a sniper rifle and then sprint back to the car. I played the second level too, this time you’re supposed to kill more Asians (some diversity might be nice). This level I somehow lost all my weapons and gadgets and couldn’t figure it out before I ran out of the time I had allotted for the game.

Would I play again? Maybe. The game wasn’t nearly as frustrating once I figured out all its quirks, but it still wasn’t as fun as the later iterations. The levels did seem to be ramping up though, and later ones may be more fun, and now that I know what I’m doing they shouldn’t be terrible.

Just don’t try to come at this game with a blank slate, because it will kick your ass.

NEXT WEEK: Half-Life 2: Episode 1

I enjoyed Half-Life 2, but never finished it. I’m a stickler for playing games in order, so even though I have the Orange Box (on both PC and Xbox 360), I never played the follow up. Will I manage to play through Half-Life 2′s campaign in time to get a review in for Episode 1? And if so, will I enjoy it as much as I enjoyed the original game?